A camera man gets up, close, and personal with the human and machine actors on the “Sparked” set.

If you thought “SPARKED” – the new short film by Cirque du Soleil, ETH Zurich, and Verity Studios – is too real-looking to be CGI, you were right. But why go to all the trouble of using quadrotors to get those lampshades dancing in the air for real? We asked Bill Keays, Science and Technology Advisor at Cirque du Soleil, to give us an insider’s perspective about Cirque’s motivation for the film and how it came together.

A major new sci-fi movie, Automata, promises to not only provide a feast for the eyes (see below for a clip from the film), but an overdue opportunity to spotlight some of the ethical dilemmas arising from autonomous systems.

It seems like our most popular visions of the future always end with environmental collapse, authoritarian oppression … and the ever-popular zombie apocalypse. Project Hieroglyph challenges science fiction writers to collaborate deeply with researchers working at the cutting edge of knowledge, not just as fact checkers, but as equal partners. We need your help transforming these big ideas into new collective realities. Won’t you join us?

+Brauer carefully chooses vintage objects that have an industrial past, alters their appearance, sculpts them, and incorporates light sources into their structure before assembling the parts together to create a unique and poetic artwork.

This is an excerpt from The Drone Primer: A Compendium of the Key Issues, a free, one-stop, handbook addressing the basic and fundamental questions around drones in all their contexts, from foreign theaters of war to domestic civilian use. This basic report covers technology, history, strategy, law, and culture, and includes a portfolio of drone art.

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Max Rheiner from Zurich University of the Arts (ZHDK) about his project Birdly. Birdly explores the experience of a bird in flight with several methods. Unlike a common flight simulator, the user embodies a bird, the Red Kite. To evoke this embodiment, Birdly mainly relies on the sensory-motor coupling. The participant can control the simulator with their hands and arms, which directly correlates to the wings and the primary feathers of the bird. Those inputs are reflected in the flight model of the bird and displayed physically by the simulator through nick, roll and heave movements.

“Why We Love Robots” is a 5-minute short documentary film co-directed by UC Berkeley Prof. Ken Goldberg and his wife, award-winning filmmaker Tiffany Shlain. The film was nominated for an Emmy Award and won a “Botscar” (Robot filmOscar) at the 2014 Robot Film Festival, and explores the human fascination with robots and new research trends in the field.